Date/Time
Date(s) - 28/02/2025
3:30 pm - 5:00 pm

Location
LR Wilson Hall Room# 1003

Dr. Lisa Bhungalia – Elastic Empire: Refashioning War Through Aid in Palestine

Dr. Bhungalia is an Assistant Professor of Geography and International Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison

Though the US-led “war on terror” has been ongoing for over two decades, it is a war that has been waged largely in the shadows. This talk tracks a little-known but ever-expanding dimension of US counterterrorism warfare, one that travels in and through a growing body of US counterterrorism law and sanctions regimes that tether to foreign aid flows and monetary transactions around the world. Drawing on over a decade of ethnographic fieldwork in Palestine, this talk traces how US counterterrorism law bundles and embeds in humanitarian and development aid flows inbound to the West Bank and Gaza Strip, transporting, in turn, Washington’s counterterrorism regime into the intimate spaces and interstices of Palestinian everyday life. In so doing, it demonstrates how US empire operates as a topological formation that projects security and war power through opaque arrangements and blended genres of rule – in this case contracted relationships of aid – that render Washington’s counterterrorism regime intimately embedded in the lifeworlds of those afar. More broadly, it suggests that a close analysis of the topological workings of the US security state in Palestine tells us something significant about the shape-shifting nature of imperial formations, their realignments and reformulations, their haunted sites, and their obscured but intimate forms.

This talk is part of the Department of Anthropology Seminar Series and co-sponsored by the Department of Communication Studies and Media Arts and the Institute on Globalization and the Human Condition.

Upcoming Speaker Series:

Friday, March 21, 2025 – 3:30pm – 5:00pm
Location: BSB 137
Dr. Travis Steffens (Assistant Professor of Anthropology, University of Guelph)
Talk Title: TBA
Research: Biogeography, One Health, Conservation, Lemurs, Community Ecology, Spatial Ecology

Friday, April 4, 2025 – 2:00pm – 3:30pm (*new time*)
Location: BSB 121 (*new location*)
Dr. Rhonda C. George (Assistant Professor, Department of Sociology and Anthropology, University of Guelph)
Talk Title: TBA
Research: Critical Race Studies, Black Studies, Intersectionality, Social Reproduction, Caribbean Diaspora